


OZYMANDIUS - on demolitions, and being god

by yellogazello



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: God Complex, Prose Poem, Villain Wilbur Soot, ozymandius is one of my favourite poems ever, wilbur has lost it, wilbur is the king of kings, wow that stream am i right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:41:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26916028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellogazello/pseuds/yellogazello
Summary: do your best, and do your best. and when everyone turns their back on you, when everyone’s piss-scared of you and your smeared shaking fingers, do them one better. blow them all to hell.(wilbur takes a break from rigging his explosives and goes for a walk.)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 78





	OZYMANDIUS - on demolitions, and being god

_ i met a traveller from an antique land who said: _

_ ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone  _

_ stand in the desert.’ — _

near them on the sand, half-sunk, walks a shattered vision of a man, whose boots are laced with coal-dust and tunnel-damp, whose curls are fingered with fever and sweat, whose face is blanched milk-white and hollowed out with shadow-bruise. and his fingers won’t stop fucking trembling. he keeps walking, and he keeps walking, and when his knees fall to chalk and his legs give way he keeps walking, because he can’t stop at this point, not now: he’s a juggernaut, he’ll thunder on, he’ll stomp and crush and blow his way to victory or he’ll rust away to splinters trying. he’s a wonderful thing, a powerful thing, really. he’s got something none of the others do: this metal-bright sort of  _ resilience.  _

(do your best, and do your best. and when everyone turns their back on you, when everyone’s piss-scared of you and your smeared shaking fingers, do them one better. blow them all to hell.)

he’s been working tirelessly in tunnels and vents, sheltered and shouldered by a warm womb of dirt. dirt, steel and dirt, muddy knees and throb-frozen toes, crossing wires, turning cables over in his oil-worn palms, slumped open-mouthed and obsessive on floors that don’t bend to his will yet. and his eyes have burned themselves to wakefulness, his limbs have shocked themselves into position, he has killed sleep cold and twitching (yes, he’s a broken bloody king with a dagger beneath his pillow, glamis and macbeth shall sleep no more) but his hands, his fingers, they won’t stop  _ fucking trembling _ — like train tracks, they judder and jerk, they keep missing the right wires and switches, rendering themselves useless. so shoves them in his pockets, shrugs on his trenchcoat, and goes for a walk. 

he’s tired. he sees things. wires snap and writhe at his ankles, snake themselves into letters, words, decelerations of independence, shopping lists, hit lists, dancing snatches of phrases, things he’s said, heard, never dared to think. he sees people, hears mumbles and murmurs turning in his footfalls ( _ wilbur, wilbur, this isn’t right, this isn’t moral, what are you doing?) _ fuck you, tommy, like you’re some haloed bloom of innocence, like you weren’t drumming your engines and ready to die for it a week ago, like you didn’t want to split schlatt’s forehead in two like william tell’s fucking apple — sentimental, tommy must be, deluded, convinced there’s still a l’manberg to go home to, that they’ll all sign a treaty and wipe their hands and go to fucking bed. or maybe he’s just neat, preferred revolution when it was all slim streamlined arrows, hooting and hollering. oh, and fuck you, tubbo, some revolutionary you are, some  _ grand saviour  _ you are, like you weren’t happy being schlatt’s little toady just then, yeah, fuck you eret, and fundy, and to hell with the rest of them — fuck you.

his quivering fingers trace the base of the cold form before him. big stone boots. he’ll be sad to see niki go. maybe he could warn her, get her to avoid the festival, have her as his new right hand. but he’d made that mistake before, that had been his downfall, not ambition — he’d knelt to that chest-filling curse of  _ sympathy.  _ what did sympathy get you? a cave. a campfire. friends that left your side, one by one. when everything was gone, there’d be no need for friends. when everything was gone, he could start again, start properly, be a real president, make a country that would run like clockwork. a government to implement his laws, a police force to uphold them. but that’s far off yet: wires and vents first, hours and hours of crawling and fiddling and rigging tnt, of lying good and quiet and low… waiting. waiting in the belly of the ground, shaking in the dark. a match. a fuse. and then…  _ then… _ and his face lights up, black joy creeps over his shadow-carved features like oil, his eyes are red and raw and his mouth is stretched gaping wide and it falls open further as he laughs and chokes and gasps and laughs… and then. all those happy happy people. deafening noise. and then... silence.

...and then emergence, onto an acrid flat-plastered wasteland. water blown straight out of lakes, forests stripped bare. houses, monuments, remaining walls, all flattened. white noise.

falling ash and smoke-stain. a black curtain of soot.

soot.

wilbur lies in the sand. his tongue is grainy with it. his unwashed hair is full of it. the air is violet and twilight-cool, and he thinks to the stone under his cheek, the statue above it — scorch me, freeze me, drown me, parch me, i am god. and after all the old people go, the new ones will build streets and cities and monuments in honour of my name, and the molecules and atoms of me will sink down into the ground; and then i will be bigger than everyone else, bigger than king or president or emperor, i will be forest and river and desert and wasteland, i will be concrete and abstract, i will be feared and worshipped, i will be known. and through fear and words and worship, i alone will live forever. 

despair, for i will live forever.

(somewhere else, not here, two boys sit on a grassy hill, consider running away: the sky is tawny-brandy and they’ll have all they need, why wait for the ground to erupt beneath their feet? go now, run now like a good boy, live another day. but they won’t run. the world needs saving. here’s yet some liquor left.)

in the desert now lies king of kings. colossally sick. boundlessly bare. his statue bends down to him, cradles his cheek — his flesh is so alive, and yet he is already so full of rot. wilbur lies in decay.

hope lasts. fear dies. and the lone and level sands stretch far away.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first published fic in exactly a year (to the day !!) how mad is that !! ive been working on a massive mighty boosh fic all year long but wow this stream was intense and i adore the dream smp plotline so obvs i had to write smth :)
> 
> also sorry if there are mistakes i wrote this in about an hour and i have no brain cells to spare for things like ‘proof reading’ and ‘drafts’ sixth form is draining me dry
> 
> i barely post my writing but talk to me and look at my art on my tumblr (yellogazello) or insta (primrxses) !
> 
> also pleaaase comment it makes me so happy


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